Wednesday, August 22, 2007

While cleaning up some old email just now, I came across this satellite photo from Christmas 2004 of the Texas coast dusted with snow. Folks, this is an extremely rare thing! Cool photo, too. The upper coast starts at about West Matagorda Bay and goes all the way down the coast into Mexico.

I just bought a remote shutter release for my Nikon D70s. I've needed it before, and I'll need it for the HDR photos I've been meaning to take (that's why I bought the camera). I took a few photos of the night sky to play around with it. None of them are that good, but here are a couple after cropping.

This first one (above) of the moon looks like a grey ball that is illuminated by a flashlight. I couldn't see the dark side of the moon with the naked eye, but it shows up well in the photo. It was windy, so some of the blurriness may be due to slight shaking of the camera. The exposure took around 10 seconds. I increased the contrast a tad to get rid of some of the glare from the cloudy sky. I like the clouds and whatever chromatic aberrations are going on there. It looks like a frame from a silent movie.

This shows the glow over some hills in front of our house. The red light (two, actually) is on an antenna at the nearby fire hall. Depending on your monitor, you may or may not be able to see the silhouette of the trees and what I assume are utility poles on the horizon. I like it like that.